![]() It’s much more difficult to kill than the Meltdown attacks.” But the Zombieload is rather something that you suddenly discover maybe in a cellar, maybe some loads rising from their graves. “It’s not a spectre, so it’s not something that will haunt us and it’s also not a meltdown, which is a very, very significant, imminent threat. “With Zombieload, it’s a bit different,” he said. In addition to the technical details of the attack, Gruss also looked at the impact of ZombieLoad while thinking of names – particularly because, like a zombie, the attack is much more difficult to kill. “This is why we call it the Zombieload, because it runs a bit headless around and loads data that it shouldn’t load and provides it to us then,” said Gruss. While sending out multiple load requests makes the CPU more efficient, the additional load opens the door for cause data leakage – and in addition, that extra load request doesn’t do anything very meaningful because it’s already clear that this doesn’t have the right data, he said. That’s because the attack relies on the processor sending multiple load requests out to load data (instead of loading data once), as a result of the chip carrying out processes that will work in the most optimistic, opportunistic way, said Gruss. When it comes to ZombieLoad, “the nature of the attack is also something which fits the name very well,” said Gruss. ![]() This process –thrown into the spotlight after the 2018 Spectre and Meltdown flaws came to light – is used in microprocessors so that memory can read before the addresses of all prior memory writes are known. ZombieLoad came to the forefront after a new class of side channel vulnerabilities impacting all modern Intel chips was disclosed last week, which can use speculative execution to potentially leak sensitive data from a system’s CPU. The flaws derive from a process called s peculative execution in processors. “We always try to come up with names that somehow resemble the nature of the attack,” Daniel Gruss, a security researcher from the Graz University of Technology and one of the founders of the ZombieLoad flaw, told Threatpost in a recent podcast interview. Much like the funky titles of advanced persistent threat groups, these speculative execution attacks, which impact Intel CPUs, are often named to reflect the impact behind the vulnerabilities, their attributes and how the attack processes work. If you have ever wondered why they were named what they were, Threatpost tracked down one of the researchers behind the naming convention (and discovery) and found out. There was a lot more to the name game behind choosing titles for ZombieLoad, Spectre and Meltdown than picking cool and edgy attack titles.
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